neveragain.tech

Something amazing is happening in my industry right now and I want to
take a minute to talk about it.

Americans are freaking out. They're staring down the barrel of the very
real possibility that the Trump administration will draw up lists of
Muslims living the United States. This is a dangerous first step toward
dictatorship and the end of rule of law, and those of us paying
attention are understandably worried.

The American engineering community is slowly arriving at a state of self
consciousness though: a few of them have banded together and written
a pledge stating in short, that if the US
government wants to build technology to destroy the country, then
they're going to have to find someone else to do it:

We, the undersigned, are employees of tech organizations and companies
based in the United States. We are engineers, designers, business
executives, and others whose jobs include managing or processing data
about people. We are choosing to stand in solidarity with Muslim
Americans, immigrants, and all people whose lives and livelihoods are
threatened by the incoming administration’s proposed data collection
policies. We refuse to build a database of people based on their
Constitutionally-protected religious beliefs. We refuse to facilitate
mass deportations of people the government believes to be undesirable.

We have educated ourselves on the history of threats like these, and
on the roles that technology and technologists played in carrying them
out. We see how IBM collaborated to digitize and streamline the
Holocaust, contributing to the deaths of six million Jews and millions
of others. We recall the internment of Japanese Americans during the
Second World War. We recognize that mass deportations precipitated the
very atrocity the word genocide was created to describe: the murder of
1.5 million Armenians in Turkey. We acknowledge that genocides are not
merely a relic of the distant past—among others, Tutsi Rwandans and
Bosnian Muslims have been victims in our lifetimes.

Today we stand together to say: not on our watch, and never again.

And they didn't stop there. They've done what engineers do best,
they built something: a platform to allow other people to add their
names. The list currently stands at 1239 people with new pull
requests (the process by which people request to be added) happening so
fast that they literally have had problems keeping up.

What's more, the whole thing is being developed in the open and you can
watch the process unfold. Just yesterday afternoon I was following
this ticket
where they were debating how to solve the onslaught of applicants and
introduce some uniformity for scale. The software chosen was Free,
Open, and conforming to a universal standard that's easy to follow.

What's exciting about this, for me at least, is that this could very
well be the beginning of a Code of Ethics for software engineering:
developed in the open by ourselves, in an effort to operate as a
community for the greater good.

Ethics in engineering is nothing new of course. The
Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer
has been a thing in Canada since 1922 in an effort to make sure that, in
the interest of the Public Good, engineers who built bridges would
adhere to ethics rather than employer directives.

Historically however, software engineering has been a Wild West of
people doing whatever they want, with zero focus on the ethics of what
we're doing. It's my hope that if anything comes out of a Trump
presidency, a sense of responsibility for our actions should be it.

There's a lot of potential here. In an ideal world, I'd like to see
companies and Free software projects adopting a policy of only
collaborating with engineers who have signed the pledge: a simple
declaration that we are thinking people with moral compasses who are
responsible for our actions. In much the same way that companies,
conferences, and projects have codes of conduct, I think it's time that
we acknowledge that ethics should be an integral part of what we do.

This is just one project though, and a rather US-centric one at that, so
I'm not sure it has the legs required to get us to where I think we need
to be, but it's a start, and I'm absolutely thrilled that we're
finally having this conversation.

Comments

Janine Sebastian

15 Dec 2016, 7:40 p.m. |

Sounds like it is definitely a step in the right direction. Is it exclusive to US tech workers? I know that due to the nature of the job, a lot of tech work can be done from almost anywhere, and the incoming US administration is not exactly unlikely to try outsourcing the information gathering should they find resistance in their own backyard.

Daniel Quinn

15 Dec 2016, 8:02 p.m. |

The pledge is currently US-only, though there's an issue ticket about just that, but I don't think anyone has any illusions about a pledge like this actually preventing a motivated dictator (with close ties to Russia) from getting some code written. I think this is more about refusing to be a cog in the machine.

Janine Sebastian

15 Dec 2016, 8:32 p.m. |

Oh, I get that, I'm just saying that it would make more sense to allow people from around the world to join the pledge, as it isn't just about this one issue, but any potentially ethically questionable one in the future too. I'm sure you're not the only one in a different part of the world who would join the pledge to refuse to be a part of anything like that if they could. Hopefully they address that issue ticket.

Vesna

15 Dec 2016, 8:37 p.m. |

Good that there is such an initiative, and I have two comments:

in this article there are some references to documents about ethics in crypto, programming & measurements.

altho the first commitments states: "We refuse to participate in the creation of databases of identifying information ... based on race, religion, or national origin" -- however, most of the users on social-media sites already have shared that information with the platform owner... so I see this as a contradiction. Are these people going to quit their jobs at fB00k?

Thanks for the pointer to the "Ritual" - that was new to me! And see you at FOSDEM!

Daniel Quinn

15 Dec 2016, 10:33 p.m. |

That "social media does it" loophole was mentioned on Reddit when this story broke, and I think that the wording of the pledge doesn't do a good enough addressing the fine ethical line we have to walk on stuff like this. The way I see it though is:

If your boss asks you to build a site in which people might voluntarily ask you to store their race, religion, or national origin, that seems fine to me. I don't like Facebook, so I don't use it.

If your boss asks you to build a system that collects this information without the consent of the listed members for the purposes of generating an authoritative listing, then that's not ok.

Honestly though, this is the kind of situation that has to dug into at length, involving philosophers and ethicists as well as engineers. I don't think a couple of hackers can pull one together in a weekend :-)

But yes, FOSDEM! I'm looking forward to it. Maybe you should lead a talk on this very subject!